Isn’t the penis the ultimate symbol of power? In old (and not so old) paintings penises are disguised as towers, swords or guns, while in our ultra explicit times — when metaphors are hardly still necessary – bare erected penises are all over the internet and virtual chat platforms. The small – but all too big – difference between men and women is overcoded with meanings, fraught with expectations, that have turned an innocent difference into a millennia-old hierarchy.

The series Little Monsters revisits the infamous object and offers a deconstructive reflection on its symbolic power. Those little monsters do not have a male body to support them, nor to inject them with the blood needed to perform their erected glory. But they are not dead. They get a life of their own, no longer threatening, almost comic. In Hervé’s visual study qualities like force, domination and power are dissolved but leave a trace. In the space of their absence we can suddenly see anew — with empathic eyes — a strange and vulnerable organ that hardly resembles its old self.